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RE: About me
July 27, 2017 at 11:32 pm
(This post was last modified: July 27, 2017 at 11:34 pm by AFTT47.)
(July 27, 2017 at 6:17 am)chimp3 Wrote: Welcome! At your age I was not a flat earther but an atheist who believed extraterrestrials helped build the Pyramids. Ditto on learning skepticism. Doubt is a great tool to have.
Yup, I was there too! I saw no gods but aliens were everywhere!
I wish I knew the name of the documentary I saw which destroyed the whole "Chariots of the Gods" nonsense. It aired sometime in the late 70s. It demonstrated exactly how structures like the pyramids could be built with ancient knowledge and capabilities. That documentary opened my mind to skepticism more than anything else. I was a specialized skeptic (skeptic of Christianity and other world religions) before and a general skeptic afterward.
I think it's fairly easy to become a special skeptic. You see the illogic in something you didn't want to believe in anyway. You only become a general skeptic when you accept that something you wanted to believe in is crap. Once you've done that, you automatically apply the principles of skepticism to everything. It isn't necessarily fun. A general skeptic will never have the comfort of a true security blanket. He/she will view the world through a much clearer lens though.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
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RE: About me
July 27, 2017 at 11:40 pm
Welcome.
My challenge to flat earthers has always been to physically locate the edge of the world and show us.
So far they haven't. Perhaps they've fallen off?
Playing Cluedo with my mum while I was at Uni:
"You did WHAT? With WHO? WHERE???"
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RE: About me
July 28, 2017 at 12:16 am
(July 27, 2017 at 11:49 pm)Aegon Wrote: (July 27, 2017 at 6:17 am)chimp3 Wrote: Welcome! At your age I was not a flat earther but an atheist who believed extraterrestrials helped build the Pyramids. Ditto on learning skepticism. Doubt is a great tool to have.
I used to sincerely and unironically listen to Alex Jones. The Bilderbergs control THE WORLD!!
Oh no
we they don't!
Playing Cluedo with my mum while I was at Uni:
"You did WHAT? With WHO? WHERE???"
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RE: About me
July 28, 2017 at 5:54 am
Being skeptical is a good thing. Though you have to be careful not to be too skeptical, to keep your standards of evidence reasonable. I once also used to believe that airplanes didn't exist (coming up with that idea myself), but I was convinced on an Internet forum that my standards of evidence were simply unreasonable. And just like I believed that hell didn't exist, I used to believe that prisons also don't exist, but then my mother ended up in prison.
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RE: About me
July 28, 2017 at 10:23 am
I used to believe that the Duke University Parapsychology Department had statistically proven ESP. Then a couple of young men showed how easy it was to fool the researchers. When they tightened their protocols to eliminate cheating, their results went to what you would expect from chance.
That was a big influence on me becoming more skeptical.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.